


I Am Rose. You Love Me.

by mayaspice



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Dementia, Established Relationship, F/M, Feels, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Letters, Love, Old Age, Romance, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 12:31:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16326302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayaspice/pseuds/mayaspice
Summary: Old age has taken its toll on the Doctor and his last breath is on the countdown. An equally old Rose tries to honour his life in death.





	I Am Rose. You Love Me.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, guys, I've written 4 things in 10 days. I just keep coming up with new ideas and I have to get them down. This one is a sad one.

It all happens so fast.

One day, he’s kissing her for the first time on a beach – hands desperately clutching her waist, her cheeks, her back – and then he’s cradling their new born in his arms – hooded, new eyes staring back at old, wise ones – and now he’s wrinkled and deflated, sinking into his arm chair and forgetting his own name.

Rose thinks it’s because of her selfishness. It had started innocent enough: occasionally forgetting to turn the oven off, silly moments of blankness when he couldn’t remember how many pence are in a pound, and she didn’t urge him to see a GP because a diagnosis would only confirm what she had spent her whole adult life trying to forget: that he was just another fragile human.

And now he’s merely a shell of the man she once knew.

She washes him, brushes his teeth, tucks him into bed, feeds him, and even though she _aches_ , she does it all because she still loves him with every damn deteriorating bone in her body. But she’s too old to care for another baby. She’s got deep-bedded wrinkles like him, sagging flesh and weak lungs.

But at least she knows who she is. Who he is.

Every day when she wipes his face clean with a warm, wet flannel, she hopes that it will be the day when recognition will flash across his face and he’ll bury his nose into the crook of her neck and weep with relief. She’s seen too many romantic comedies.

 

 

 

It gets too much, inevitably, and she calls in a favour from Torchwood. Rose and the Doctor are something like legends within the company, so it’s not difficult to arrange.

She takes him back to their old place of work after hours and there they meet a tall, wide man in a suit who leads them to a remote warehouse at the back of the lot. In the middle of the room is a thick metal ball. Rose hasn’t seen one of these for a long time. A space ship. With the help of the man, she eases the Doctor into the jump seat of the small pod. He looks so tiny and helpless amongst all the buttons and levers; it breaks her heart.

Rose presses a gentle kiss to the Doctor’s cracked lips and places a folded piece of paper onto his lap. She indulges a few tears when the door slams closed and he stares blankly at her through the thick glass.

The man touches Rose's elbow, shuffles her to the side of the room before there’s a whirring sound and a burst of heat. The roof opens up and the pod is catapulted out, like a gun shot, into the night.

 

 

 

The Doctor winces as he’s thrashed around. His shoulder bone shatters against the jump seat. He thinks he might vomit but before his last meal crawls up his throat, the pod leaves the Earth’s atmosphere and the shaking lulls. When he peeks out the window, he sees the green and blue and white surface of the Earth shrinking. For the first time in a long time, he smiles.

His unsteady hand goes to touch the glass and brushes the note in his lap en route. It becomes his priority. With difficulty, he unfolds it.

 

My Darling Doctor,

I am Rose. You love me.

You made me cups of tea when I was poorly, kissed me good morning and good night every day, soothed me when I was sad. It took me a long time to understand your love. You love in a way that is so unique and complicated. You once told me that you could never love anyone as much as you love me and although that’s not strictly a lie, I do believe you can love some _things_ more. Space. Time. Travelling. Milky ways, galaxies, black holes, solar systems, stars, satellites, planets, asteroids, gravity, particles, black matter. Existence is your true love. And I don’t mind being a mistress to her.

Our love is something secondary to you. We developed and worked on it (God, how hard we worked), we cared for and cultivated it in our hands. We watched it blossom as we grew old together - such an average and yet once impossible concept for us - and I am so grateful for its result in our two wonderful children. There was a time in my life when I thought we could never be together, and the fact that there are two people on Earth that are half me and half you is nothing short of a miracle.

But your love of life and travel is inherent. Although sometimes you can’t remember your name, or who I am, or how to get your legs to move, I know you still feel a pull when you look out to the stars. When I visited you in the hospital, you thought I was a nurse. You asked me to push the blinds up so you could see the night sky. When I told you who I was, you said there’s a star called Rose that you christened because of its colour.

I wish we could’ve gone together – in some spectacular alien invasion, or even in deep sleep – but the world plays cruel tricks sometimes. I have every faith that this is how you would want it.

I love you so fiercely that it will last in the atmosphere until every universe ceases to exist. You will always live on.

More than forever,

Your Rose.

 

 

 

The letter is right. There’s a tightening in his chest, like there’s a string attached to the burning clumps of fire outside. His fingers shift with a longing to touch.

On the dashboard in front of him is a big red button. There’s a note that says, ‘Push when you are ready.’

Ready for what, he isn’t sure. But now seems a good a time as any. He pushes the button with as much force as his crippled hand can muster. The door cranks and a digital message appears on the screen in front of him. And in the excitement and anticipation, he forgets how to read. He looks down at the letter in his hand and suddenly it’s just scribbles on a page. He pushes the red button again.

The door unclamps and the Doctor is expelled into the blackness. He floats there, feeling the warmth and the cold, the vastness and compactness, the fear and the comfort, the paradox that is life, all that was and all that can be.

His skin begins to prickle. His tongue starts to bubble. He can’t breathe, there’s no oxygen here, but he thinks he’s okay with it. It develops into pain quickly, until it feels like everything is on fire: skin, bones, muscle, blood, hair but - for some reason he can’t recall - he feels that he’s deserving of a death by burning.

He tries to keep his eyes open as long as possible, to bask in his insignificance. But his significance gets in the way. All around him are millions, billions, trillions of lives with infinite possibilities and he can feel them all; they run through him: the man he used to be, the man he is now, the man he could’ve been, piloting a blue police box some-other-where some-other-time.

With one last glimpse at a blush-tinged star, he dies.


End file.
